All posts tagged Iridium

SpaceX’s next launch, the latest in a series of missions to deploy satellites of the Iridium Next mobile communications fleet, will liftoff on Friday, March 30 from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Iridium-5 mission patch (courtesy nasaspaceflight.com)

A Falcon 9 rocket that was previously launched, recovered and then re-flown during the Iridium-3 mission will carry 10 satellites into the black and deploy them into Polar Low Earth Orbit. Liftoff is scheduled for 10:13am EDT (14:13 UTC).

This mission was to have launched on Thursday, March 29, but Iridium reported an issue with one of the ten satellites during preparation for the mission, which necessitated a postponement until Friday.

It is still unknown whether SpaceX will attempt to land and recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 for this mission. At this point it looks unlikely, but if there’s one thing we’ve come to expect from SpaceX, it’s a willingness to defy expectations.

Ernie Banks, the famous Hall of Fame shortstop and first baseman who played for the Chicago Cubs for nearly two decades, was known for saying, “It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame– let’s play two!” This weekend, SpaceX will likely do its best Ernie Banks impersonation, launching not one, but two Falcon 9 rockets into the black inside of 72 hours.

That’s right– two launches, one from each coast. First up will be the rescheduled BulgariaSat-1 launch on Friday from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was originally scheduled to launch on June 15 but was postponed so that a suspect fairing valve could be replaced. The new launch window for this mission opens Friday at approximately 2:10 pm EDT (1810 GMT), and a backup launch opportunity is also available on Saturday, if necessary. The Falcon 9 first stage booster that will be used for this mission will fly for the second time when it blasts off with BulgariaSat-1. This same booster launched on January 14 of this year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, then landed on a platform on one of SpaceX’s drone barges in the Pacific Ocean after carrying its payload into space. This time around, the booster will land on the recovery barge “Of Course I Still Love You,” which be anchored off the Florida coast.

Then on Sunday, a second Falcon 9 will launch a cluster of Iridium communications satellites from Vandenberg AFB, California. The launch window for this mission is scheduled for 4:24:59 pm EDT (1:24:59 pm PDT, or 2024:59 GMT). These satellites have an instantaneous launch window so that they can be deployed to the correct location in Iridium’s existing fleet of orbiting satellites.

If SpaceX is successful in pulling off this launch doubleheader, it will not only be the fastest turnaround time for Falcon 9 launches in the company’s history, but it will also be the shortest turnaround between launches in the history of the modern US commercial launch industry!

For those who are interested in watching SpaceX make history yet again, live webcasts for both of these launches should be available on SpaceX’s YouTube channel and at spacex.com approximately 20 minutes before liftoff.

It looks like it’ll be a great weekend, so to paraphrase the immortal words of Mr. Sunshine, let’s launch two!

In addition to being the nation’s first geostationary communications satellite, this launch will also add a note to the history of spaceflight as the second such launch to utilize a previously flown booster. The flight is the latest in SpaceX’s ambitious development program to make reusable launch vehicles 100% reusable in the hopes of reducing the overall cost of access to space by an order of magnitude. The first stage of this particular rocket was launched on January 14 and carried multiple satellites to add to the Iridium communications constellation before successfully landing under its own power.

“Elon Musk and his SpaceX team have convinced me that people like them bring us closer to a new quality of life through providing access to cutting-edge technology,” stated BulgariaSat chief executive Maxim Zayakov. “This is a chance for Bulgaria to join the efforts to develop these new aspects of space industry.”

The scheduled two-hour long launch window opens at 1410 EDT (1810 UTC) from the historic Launch Complex 39A, the former launching pad of the American Space Shuttle. The launch will be streamed live from SpaceX’s YouTube channel and at spacex.com.